What SRE teams need before they trust AI agents

Site reliability engineering (SRE) teams should only trust AI agents in production when they have three foundational elements: grounded observability (complete logs, traces, and ownership data that the AI can reason over), clear guardrails (explicit permission models and approval gates that limit what the agent can do), and a progressive autonomy approach (starting with read-only tasks like summarizing incidents before allowing automated actions). Trust in AI for operations is earned through evidence of reliable behavior under real stress, not through impressive demos.